1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image pickup apparatus for attaining a high-definition plane image, and an image pickup apparatus capable of attaining both a stereoscopic image and a high-definition plane image by itself.
2. Related Background Art
Japanese Laid-open Patent Application No. 5-344422 discloses the image pickup apparatus for obtaining the high-definition plane image in such a manner that a multi-eye image pickup system with left and right pickup systems is used to obtain two image information sets; a correlation arithmetic is carried out for the two image information sets obtained, to attain position information of an object; an angle between the optical axes of the both pickup systems, which is an angle of vergence, is controlled based on the position information; and pixels composing one of the two images are superimposed with a shift of the half pitch on those composing the other, thereby obtaining the high-definition plane image. This image pickup apparatus can operate as a stereoscopic camera well known, by changing over the operation of processing circuits and separately taking image signals of the two pickup systems out.
The multi-eye image pickup apparatus as described in the above Japanese application, however, required accurate control of the vergence angle in order to attain high-definition plane images for objects at various distances, which resulted in needing a high-accuracy positioning mechanism, disadvantegeously causing an increase in the size, weight, and cost of the whole image pickup apparatus.
The above multi-eye image pickup apparatus also had the problems of high cost and high dissipation power because a correlation arithmetic circuit for the two image information sets obtained from the multi-eye pickup system is complex and because throughput of this circuit is enormous The same problems were also caused by an image synthesizing circuit used for superposition of images.
The above multi-eye image pickup apparatus needed to use expensive lenses with little aberration and with little production error with regard to focal length, because high-accuracy image synthesis could not be expected if the left and right pickup systems in the multi-eye image pickup system had different aberration characteristics or different focal lengths.